who, because of Shockley’s tyrannical management style, defected from his start-up to start a competing firm. The defection is part of the Valley’s most sacred lore as an example of the intellectual and technical freedom that would make the region an entrepreneurial hotbed unlike anything the world had previously seen. Many have long believed that Shockley’s decision to locate his transistor company in Mountain View was the spark that ignited Silicon Valley. However, it is more interesting to ask what Shockley was trying to accomplish. He has long been viewed as an early entrepreneur, fatally flawed as a manager. Still, his entrepreneurial passion has served as a model for generations of technologists. But that was only part of the explanation.
Brock sat in the Stanford archives staring at a yellowing single-page proposal titled the “A.T.R. Project.” Shockley, true to his temper, didn’t mince words: “The importance of the project described below is probably greater than any previously considered by the Bell System,” he began. “The foundation of the largest industry ever to exist may well be built upon its development. It is possible that the progress achieved by industry in the next two or three decades will be directly dependent upon the vigor with which projects of this class are developed.” The purpose of the project was, bluntly, “the substitution of machines for men in production.” Robots were necessary because generalized automation systems lacked both the dexterity and the perception of human workers. “Such mechanization will achieve the ultimate conceivable economy on very long runs but will be impractical on short runs,” he wrote. Moreover, his original vision was not just about creating an “automatic factory,” but a trainable robot that could be “readily modified to perform any one of a wide variety of operations.” His machine would be composed of “hands,” “sensory organs,” “memory,” and a “brain.” 1
Shockley’s inspiration for a humanlike factory robot was that assembly work often consists of a myriad of constantly changing unique motions performed by a skilled human worker, and that such a robot was the breakthrough needed to completely replace human labor. His insight was striking because it came at the very dawn of the computer age, before the impact of the technology had been grasped by most of the pioneering engineers. At the time it was only a half decade since ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer, had been heralded in the popular press as a “giant brain,” and just two years after Norbert Wiener had written his landmark Cybernetics, announcing the opening of the Information Age.
Shockley’s initial insight presaged the course that automation would take decades later. For example, Kiva Systems, a warehouse automation system acquired in 2012 by Amazon for $775 million, had the insight that the most difficult functions to automate in the modern warehouse were ones that required human eyes and hands, like identifying and grasping objects. Without perception and dexterity, robotic systems are limited to the most repetitive jobs, and so Kiva took the obvious intermediate step and built mobile robots that carried items to stationary human workers. Once machine perception and robotic hands became better and cheaper, humans could disappear entirely.
Indeed, Amazon made an exception to its usual policy of secrecy and invited the press to tour one of its distribution facilities in Tracy, California, during the Christmas buying season in December of 2014. What those on the press tour did not see was the development of an experimental station inside the facility where a robot arm performed the “piece pick” operations—the work now reserved for humans. Amazon is experimenting with a Danish robot arm designed to do the remaining human tasks.
In the middle of the last century, while Shockley expressed no moral qualms about using trainable robots
Brock sat in the Stanford archives staring at a yellowing single-page proposal titled the “A.T.R. Project.” Shockley, true to his temper, didn’t mince words: “The importance of the project described below is probably greater than any previously considered by the Bell System,” he began. “The foundation of the largest industry ever to exist may well be built upon its development. It is possible that the progress achieved by industry in the next two or three decades will be directly dependent upon the vigor with which projects of this class are developed.” The purpose of the project was, bluntly, “the substitution of machines for men in production.” Robots were necessary because generalized automation systems lacked both the dexterity and the perception of human workers. “Such mechanization will achieve the ultimate conceivable economy on very long runs but will be impractical on short runs,” he wrote. Moreover, his original vision was not just about creating an “automatic factory,” but a trainable robot that could be “readily modified to perform any one of a wide variety of operations.” His machine would be composed of “hands,” “sensory organs,” “memory,” and a “brain.” 1
Shockley’s inspiration for a humanlike factory robot was that assembly work often consists of a myriad of constantly changing unique motions performed by a skilled human worker, and that such a robot was the breakthrough needed to completely replace human labor. His insight was striking because it came at the very dawn of the computer age, before the impact of the technology had been grasped by most of the pioneering engineers. At the time it was only a half decade since ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer, had been heralded in the popular press as a “giant brain,” and just two years after Norbert Wiener had written his landmark Cybernetics, announcing the opening of the Information Age.
Shockley’s initial insight presaged the course that automation would take decades later. For example, Kiva Systems, a warehouse automation system acquired in 2012 by Amazon for $775 million, had the insight that the most difficult functions to automate in the modern warehouse were ones that required human eyes and hands, like identifying and grasping objects. Without perception and dexterity, robotic systems are limited to the most repetitive jobs, and so Kiva took the obvious intermediate step and built mobile robots that carried items to stationary human workers. Once machine perception and robotic hands became better and cheaper, humans could disappear entirely.
Indeed, Amazon made an exception to its usual policy of secrecy and invited the press to tour one of its distribution facilities in Tracy, California, during the Christmas buying season in December of 2014. What those on the press tour did not see was the development of an experimental station inside the facility where a robot arm performed the “piece pick” operations—the work now reserved for humans. Amazon is experimenting with a Danish robot arm designed to do the remaining human tasks.
In the middle of the last century, while Shockley expressed no moral qualms about using trainable robots
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